CanadianCIO

October 2012 - Free Online IT Magazine

Each issue of Canadian CIO will look at the business outcomes driving IT investments in large public and private sector enterprises. It will provide a framework for effectively moving from ideas to action.

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For many, of course, the answer is a hybrid infrastructure incorporating both public and pri- vate clouds, and bringing the best of both worlds: combining the dynamism and availability of public cloud services with the security, compliance and integration of on-premise private cloud. But hybrid architecture from operations perspective is typically the most expensive approach, according to Wehbe. Some businesses are also particularly well suited to a hy- brid cloud. Wehbe points to the example of a school board that moved students' IT services to the public cloud, while keeping administration on-premise to maintain privacy and security compliance.
Still, for all the advantages of a hybrid model, Wehbe points out organizations really need to plan ahead and create a clear roadmap based on business and operations needs: they must build a scalable integrated architecture that doesn't need to be constantly reengineered with every change in the cloud technology. He notes that selection of cloud providers is another success factor; certain providers have complete enterprise private and public cloud so- lutions that leverage the existing infrastructure. In addition, one should consider there may be need to
efficiently architect their cloud if need to use cloud architecture from different vendors, simple and sca- lable cloud architecture will help IT to cut the cost of operations.
You need to build a roadmap to determine if it's appropriate to have a complete private cloud architecture, complete public, or hybrid. I find most organizations are going hybrid
You need to have a strategy.
Perhaps the biggest surprise to IT leaders trying to better understand cloud is that, despite the hype, it's not always about cost-savings, but about the benefits of dynamic resource allocation, availa- bility and greater business agility. "It's not always cost-effective to move to cloud," Wehbe says. "If you go to cloud without a complete operations model that supports it, you need to consider that there are then risks associa- ted around cost.
Principal Consultant and Solution Architect, Itergy
Rami Wehbe "In the short-term when you
don't consider all requirements, it will generate risk and technical constraints down on the road when you try to leverage the
existing infrastructure. In the long-term when you make sure everything is ready for cloud, that's a mature model," he stresses. "Decision makers need to be aware there can be hidden costs."